Poetry Faculty

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Barry Spacks

What others say:

“I enjoy reading Barry Spacks’ poetry for his attention to real things, real people, real life. He finds ways to know everything — the earth, the air — as miraculous, as beautiful, as playful.”
— Maxine Hong Kingston

“These are tender and beautiful poems that, while worldly and knowing, seek to return its innocence to the world they look at.”
— David Ferry

“Barry Spacks is the most companionable of poets, speaking to us with an easy wit and an offhand intelligence of what he sees, thinks, or remembers. Though he would never engage in philosophical harangue, what transpires from many of his poems, is a kind of wisdom having to do with release from the importunate self. . . . The genuineness of Spacks’ concern with this theme is reflected everywhere in the blitheness and freedom of his delightful style.”
— Richard Wilbur

Selected Works by Barry Spacks

THE ASSIMILATION

It's coming along, the assimilation,
though granted in certain parts of the world
like Idaho the pace seems slow
and nowhere exactly what you might call
a rush on skullcaps and circumcision;

but take my colleague Wayne O'Neil:
on the phone about some political mess
he calls it (three times) "this mishegas!"
plus the Jews on TV are heroes now,
charmers, played by Swedes, Italians,

so maybe – say in ten thousand years? –
discoursing Talmud, shrugging their shoulders,
even the grim ones will think to join us?
(we who take jokes as a serious business)
clapping, dancing, teasing in accents....

A FATHER

Still in boyhood's sleep when he died,
I gathered scraps of evidence,
made him up from memories
of his clopping me when I passed too close,
his bawdy laugh with a waitress once,
the naps he took in trousers and undershirt,
angers in the kitchen, joyously
slammed-down pinochle cards with friends...

from his Yiddish jokes, from the orange-striped robe
he wore down Trenton Avenue
when we walked to the beach where I sat alone
squinting in slat-lined light beneath
the Boardwalk. Forty years it took
before I'd admit the hand that clopped me
wasn't sending a Yiddish joke
but a casual, lethal communication.

Who was this father, and what was I,
only a target, a scuttling backside?
Once on a plane to Kentucky I gazed
in the eyes of a little child, a girl
named Jadell, five months old, said her mother,
window-seated, the child between us.
I gazed and saw such completeness there
she made me a while complete.

Did he ever see me so perfect, my father,
all drowsing or noise? Did he laugh when I grabbed
a finger?
Some days it's like me who died,
from his unlit eyes,
from his face turned away.
I've known the weariness of entrapment,
sagging hopes, male misery;

I can imagine a hopelessness
so deep a child
only brings more pain;
and yet all these years of wanting warmth
from him, entitlement to being! –
warmth from eyes now empty sockets;
a smile from a face so long underground
it's simply a mask of bone.

WHITEWATER VISION

Like everyone else I've served my time
lying under the weight of a mountain,
breathing stones...yet always my blood,
like leveling water, knows where it's wanted.

Once I had a whitewater vision:
beneath the rage of the rapids I sensed
the undersound to the river's sound...
indistinguishable from silence.

Who am I? Not a solving...a seeing.
I'd view the storm through eyes of calm.
I'd speak to say
where the silence is.

On days when it seems the food for the journey
is clay, not bread, and the spirit famished,
as dusk transfigures everything
I pause, near silence: listening.

OH, EVERYTHING, ABSOLUTE GIVING!

When I was a kid working Saturdays
at the Quality Market, our family's market,
I'd toss back jokes at the butchers, open
brown paper bags with a whoosh, in charge
of cutting deals on wilted beans
graying grapefruit lining the floor
in green metal tins I bargained over
with the poor.

One Christmas Eve,
inching my prices down out front
trying to sell the last of the wreathes,
the mistletoe and trees, all at once
without permission I shouted "Free!
Free Christmas stuff!" and could have thrown in
the fixtures, blood oranges, blood of the lamb,
such explosion of freedom, such joy filled me then,
handing out greens in Camden's hard cold.

DIM SUM

I know, I know, if Ernest Hemingway
had savored the chicken bits
in piquant sauce
at the great Dim Sum Restaurant
in Monterey Park, California, he
still would have...could have...

or if Richard Brautigan
toward the withered end
had paused for the scallops at the Dim Sum
or ordered the platter of three
huge cream-filled dumplings, still he –
I know, I know, stupid thought,

but if only
John Berryman...Anne Sexton...
if Sylvia Plath...Primo Levi...
if Kathryn's father…
Robert Hazel…
if Marilyn Monroe.…

PRECIOUS DISASTERS

Our triumphs drift into mist behind us,
but out of the years' long emptying
the errors remain, as if they were precious,
as if they deserved to be fondled, disasters

held in gem boxes lined with plush.
On sleepless nights, press catch after catch
to handle again some stupid choice,
some saddening act still stored undimmed,

the maladroit word that distanced a friend –
the instant before that word was spoken:
her unwarned, beautifully shining face
about to be drained of all light.

WITHIN ANOTHER LIFE

Those whose days were grudging or confused
may end up trapped within another life

as a boulder or a pane of glass,
or a door that suffers every time it's slammed.

If I return a boulder, love, some summer day
come sit by me and contemplate these horses and these hills.

And if a windowpane, gaze through to see
the meadow on our walks where brown geese strut.

And if I am a door, come home through me,
be sure I'll keep you safe.

And if a knotted, twisted rope
from long self-clenching and complexity,